Eleven

Her name was Eleven. And she was fiercely proud of it.

Yes, she had been given a number for a name, strictly so the bad men could keep track of her like the rest of the humans they treated as lab rats. Yes, they had tattooed it on her wrist so they didn't have to look it up on their clipboards. And yes, they had shaved her head to remove any chance of her attaining her own identity, or her self-respect. Or even feel just a little bit pretty.

But she was Eleven. She cherished the name, so much so that she would only let two people call her that.

One person was her dad. He earned the right to call her Eleven. He found her cold and scared and wet, crying all alone in the woods. He gave her a warm hug, told her she was safe. He had showed her more kindness in thirty seconds then she'd received in almost twelve years of captivity at the lab. He also completed her name.

She became Eleven Hopper. El for short. She was just as proud of her last name as she was her first name.

She also kept her hair just as short as it had been done in the lab. It was her defiance. Before she had been forced to have it buzzed short. Now she did it on purpose, and she wore it as a noble badge of honour, everyone else be damned.

The other person who could call her Eleven, would be the guy she fell in love with. And he would be someone who loved her just as profoundly. It hadn't happened yet. She would know who he was when it did.

They'd spent years at the lab trying to develop her telekinetic ability without success. They had been so short sighted and focused only on their own sick goals that they couldn't see beyond their electronic monitors and wires, their charts and graphs. The graphs went crazy with squiggles, zigzags, sine waves. They completely ignored the obvious.

Eleven wasn't telekinetic. She could not move things with her mind. Sure she tried, just so they would let her sleep on a bed with some food in her belly. She could never move anything.

Eleven was empathetic. She knew what other people were feeling, especially if it was towards her. And she could make people dislike her, fear her, and hate her, although her dad told her that it wasn't safe to do.

She could also make people like her, even love her. She would never do that. Eleven wanted friends or the love she got to be real, not something she had created with a tweak from her mind.

She would never tell any of her real friends . They would think she had forced them to like her. El only made friends when she could tell someone genuinely liked her. The love from her dad came off in waves, it had done that almost from the first time he'd found her. He told her she needed to keep that a secret. She needed to have real friends, and he was still a little wary the lab might want to continue it's experiments if they found her or what she could do.

Max it had taken a little bit longer to be her friend. Max was her best friend. Her only friend. At first Max felt sympathy for El when she saw her short hair. She slowly realized that El sported her short hair in a dignified and sometimes imposing manner. Max grew to like her and they became steadfast friends.


The first day of school El sat at a table in the school cafeteria waiting for Max to show up. They hadn't actually decided where to sit, so one of them would flag down the other when they showed up.

Suddenly, El couldn't catch her breath, her heart was pounding. Her ears started to ring and she felt like she could faint any minute. She knew what the feeling was. Someone in the cafeteria was in love. It was intense, and this person was in pain, a good pain, El thought to herself and smiled. That was exactly the feeling she wanted to get from the guy who loved her.

She was still a little dreamy thinking about it, when someone asked if the space beside her was taken. She looked up at him and she knew her eyes must have gone wide, this was the new boy at school. He had longish shaggy black hair, deep gentle eyes, and a smile that could have derailed a train, and then put it back on the same track, safe. El was smitten with him right away, which she didn't understand that at all. If Eleven was in control of one thing, it was her emotions. Her heart depended on it.

Danger! She immediately tried to make him dislike her so he would go away. It didn't work. Then she tried to make him afraid of her. Most of the time that usually did the trick. Not with this guy. She tried to put on her most uncaring face, and make him maybe hate her a little. It was futile. It didn't work at all.

Finally she said, "go ahead."

She saw him fumble with his books while talking. He said he was new to the school, of course Max and El already knew he was Mike Wheeler. An impossibly nerdy guy, who also happened to be the cutest guy she had ever seen. Eleven! She warned herself, you can't let him sit next to you. You need more to time to find out who he is, how he feels. It's your heart you are protecting here.

She had to get out of there. She was getting weird vibes from him she couldn't explain. Eleven did not like to be out control with her emotions. Or not know exactly what other people were feeling. Her dad always told her it was a defence mechanism to keep her from getting hurt. He told her she couldn't do that forever. She had to experience the bad along with the good. It's what made us human.

Mike Wheeler was going to sit right next to her! She was unable to make him go away. Why was that? Her ability had never failed her before.

"It's fine," she said, "you can sit there." She grabbed her books as quickly as she could, got up and left.

Before she left the room, she took a quick glance back at his stunned, devastated face. El could feel the painful squeeze his heart experienced as if it had been her own. Nobody should be made to feel like that. She knew she was directly responsible. Did he like her? He didn't even know who she was. There was no way he could have any feelings for her. She felt terrible, and ran off to the girls washroom with tears in her eyes.


Max was finishing running a brush through her long red hair in the bathroom. She took one look at El's face and asked what was wrong.

"I think I just made the nicest guy in the school feel like shit."

"Would that be our Mike Wheeler, New Nerd on The Block?"

El nodded her head, not trusting herself to speak again.

"Was he being a jerk to you?… no I guess not if you called him the nicest guy in the school. You've always told me you could tell if people liked you or not, I guess that's why you and I are friends. So do you get any feeling in your bones about him, or whatever is you feel."

"I get something. I can't explain it. I don't even know him."

Max said, "far be it for me to be this eloquent, but maybe you two are lost soulmates who have found finally each other…. Ok too much?" Max grinned.

El just looked at Max about to say something sarcastic, when she remembered the feeling in the cafeteria just before Mike Wheeler had come over to her table. When she was out of breath, her heart pounding. No…. that couldn't be… could it? It was coming from someone else in the room. That person was screaming it out. It disappeared and she certainly didn't get it from Mike when he sat down.


El was a little late to Mr. Clarke's Earth class, and sat at the one free bench that was left. It looked like everyone else already had partners and there was only this one seat left.

A very disheveled Mike Wheeler was the last student to enter the classroom. It looked like he'd been beaten up, a bruise was coming up on his chin. El felt a little sorry for him. He discovered that the seat beside her was empty, and the sadness radiating off of him was heart-rending. She could also feel his embarrassment at having to sit with her. Obviously from when she'd made her rude exit at lunch.

"Sorry," he said not looking at her, "Um, I have to sit here, it's the only seat left. I can uh, maybe trade with someone else if Mr. Clarke will let me for the next class. I'm sure he'll let us pick new partners if you're totally against being mine."

He gave her a quick look before averting his eyes again. When he looked at her she thought her heart had stopped. She couldn't breathe, it was like he'd taken all the air out of the room. With his eyes. That was impossible, of course, but that's what it felt like.

El was now getting mixed feelings from him. For the briefest of seconds there was definitely a conflicted feeling of dislike coming from him. It seemed to disappear as if in apology and then she felt an honest warmth.

Sometimes her ability drove her crazy. It had always been safer to have only one friend. And never a guy friend. They always seemed to have too many hang-ups. They were never honest with her, or themselves for that matter. They could never just be friends with her. So she avoided having them as friends altogether.

Having her hair buzzed short like this was definitely a plus when it came to guys. Turned them off almost immediately. There was the occasional mouthbreather like Troy, she had to put a little fear into. For the most part, she didn't have to worry about the baggage of having guys for friends.

Maybe a guy who really liked her? Who she knew really liked her. It hadn't happened with any of the guys in Hawkins Middle over the last year, she didn't expect this year to be any different. Having a boyfriend was probably not in the cards for this year.

She sighed. She was sure Mike Wheeler was not going to be that guy, she'd know it if he was.

He wasn't.